


Condolences

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Odyssey 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:11:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1623614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The people who love Neil Taggart, looking on as he mourns his mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Condolences

**Author's Note:**

> Written for krazykipper

 

 

**Sarah**

After Corey died, you never attended a funeral without thinking of him. You never heard the time-softened weary old phrases without the ache of resonance. Now that he's alive again, it's still no different: everyone who dies is the same as your son, the woman Chuck Taggart loved is the same. You cry tears knowing that they're selfish tears, for the loss you once thought would be for all time and might yet face again. Not empathetic tears, not for her, and not for the men who lost her.

The three of them sit awkwardly together, barely a family without Paige to support them. Chuck, immobilized with rage - you can feel it, even from here, near the back. Like all his best and truest feelings, his grief is filtered through his lifelong rough brute force. Marc, still a boy - just a boy, you think, who's going to be lost for awhile, who has no idea what is surrounding him like a great sea enveloping everything he holds dear.

It's Neil who breaks your heart. The fact that he will tough this one out gracefully is written all over the planes and angles of his beautiful chiseled face. You will embrace him today as if he's a seventeen-year-old boy, newly motherless. You will not know what to say, but you'll think of a Bible verse, one you always loved.

_She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life._

* * *

**Holly**

It's hard to believe but you've never been to a funeral before. You didn't know what to wear. Like, black is obvious but what kind of black? Does the low-cut blouse you bought for your seventh date with Neil count, or does it have to be serious, and if so, where would you even get clothes like that?

You get there though, and you realize it doesn't matter. You sit away from the family, and on the opposite side of the church, so that you can just see Neil's cheekbone and the side of his shaven jaw over his tight crisp collar. Your own mother sits next to you, crying - she and Paige used to chaperone field trips together back in middle school when you and Neil barely knew each other - and wiping her eyes and nose over and over with the same one wrinkled tissue that you found in the bottom of your purse wrapped around a tube of lipstick.

It's all just so awful that you don't know what to do. You've never you're your mother cry, ever . Afterwards at the reception, you want to just give Neil the biggest hug and kiss his forehead and tell him how you're there for him and then, maybe, he'll cry.

But he's not really available for that, he's standing in a knot of people at the corner of the room, talking to this astronaut lady his dad works with and some anchor that you vaguely recognize from the morning news, who's looking at him with big bright eyes. Then a man with curly blonde hair comes over and jostles Neil with his elbow, in a friendly way somehow, like he can say everything with just an elbow.

You see Neil look up at the guy and give this _smile_ , and that's when you decide not to go to him, just to let him come to you. It's totally sad and not very big and it's obviously just about the most he can do just to maintain it for a second. You know he thinks you're the most beautiful girl in the world - he's told you so every time he messes up, every time he wants to be sweet, and you thought it was so, so romantic. But there's something he shares with the people in that corner, some understanding that hums between them, something adult and urgent that you've felt growing in him for months and can't possibly understand.

* * *

**Chuck**

When you pull into your own driveway in the twilight you feel as if it's been years, not days, since you left Neil behind for your impromptu road trip. As if, like Rip van Winkle, you might come back to find your children grown, your memory become just a name that rarely passes their lips. You can no longer feel Paige's presence in the seat beside you, it's just you and metal and leather and air, lonely, as you know you will be for the rest of your life.

That's why you took off, isn't it - loneliness seems more bearable in motion because then something to fill the void might be around every bend in the road. Answers maybe, or a pretty teenager who looks just like your wife, or an explosion big enough to wipe everything away. You couldn't face trapping yourself in a life that's not enough, incomplete, with this raw gaping hole where Paige was ripped from you too soon. But it's a thing created by love, this pathetic hobbling family that's dwindled now to just you and Neil - it's a thing you created with _her._

You have two jobs to do; one of them you might never finish and in that case you know nothing else will really matter, yet you wouldn't want to grapple with a world, even a doomed one, in which you had not been a father to Neil.

You don't register, till you've already passed it and arrived at the front door, that Kurt's car is in the driveway. You remember fleetingly that when American heroes return from their journeys they don't often find their families intact, their Penelopes weaving patiently at silent looms. Instead they come back and find their children calling somebody else Dad.

You find yourself doing something you've never done much: hesitating. Quietly and barely consciously you slip around to the kitchen window, out of which you find yourself looking so often - and look in, instead.

They've paused just between the table and the fridge, both of them in that small space. They're _embracing_ , you think with an odd sense of bewilderment, of decorum breached. You would sooner hug a goddamn snake. But Neil, Neil is holding the man, his agile thin fingers clutching the back of one of those girly European collared shirts Kurt favors. The fridge is open and propped against Kurt's leg, as if he'd been going to get a beer and this tableau just fell into place.

You think, you know, though you can't see his face, that Neil must be crying. He doesn't like doing that in front of you but you can see the total abandon in his posture. Like Kurt is the only thing holding him up at all, a flimsy support if ever there was one, but better than his others, who have all run away. 

Kurt closes his eyes then and kisses the side of Neil's head, near where the top of his ear meets his scalp, just under a lock of sweat-damp hair.

You don't know what's happening, what place you can fill in your home now, what you can even do for your son, who was the reason, in the end, that you came back. But you know you can't go inside now. You turn and slip away - you were right the first time. Nothing's left - not without your baby. 

 


End file.
